For the past five years, I've seen
America as a nation in crisis --a crisis that, at its core, I perceive
as a moral and spiritual battle, indeed a battle best understood as
between Good and Evil-- and sometimes I feel that I SEE things
clearly. This weekend brought one of those occasions: a
vision showing where Obama has taken the wrong path, and how he can get back
on track.

I continue to believe
--to hold as a conviction-- that Obama is deeply aligned with the
Good. But I believe he's made a fundamental misjudgment in the
political strategy he's employed most recently in this health-care-reform process but more generally also since Inauguration.

In the coming days, in a multi-part open letter to the president, I will declare
what I believe is Obama's principle strategic mistake. I will
describe how I imagine it happened that he made it. I will
propose the general transformation I think is called for on how Obama
plays his role as president. And I will lay out several ideas
about how he can proceed from here --both with respect to health care,
and in other ways-- to make the turn and achieve that transformation
into a more powerful and more effective president.

In this first piece, I provide a kind
of preamble: a description of the basis on which I now feel
pretty certain that Obama has made a serious misjudgment-- in this
health care reform struggle, but also more generally in his presidency.

****************

Dear Mr. President,

It's not just because I've been an enthusiastic fan of yours that I've
been hesitant until now to say you've made an importantly wrong
strategic choice. It's been mostly because two factors have made
it seem foolish for me to presume to make such a judgment.

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One of those factors is that following your strategic judgment has
proven so amazingly successful in the past. Going from where you
were in, say, 2002, to becoming President of the United States --as a
black man with only four years of experience in national politics--
suggests a capacity for strategic judgment that is beyond superior.

The other factor that inhibited me is that the political battlefield is
so extremely complex, and your strategies seemed often so subtle in
their weighing of different factors and in playing for long-term
outcomes, that I felt unable to discern what all the calculations and
plans you might be interweaving in your specific decisions.

So, while I've expressed some concerns and doubts, I've never felt able
to say with real conviction that you were making a mistake and that I
can offer you some counsel that you would be wise to heed.

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Until now. Now it seems clear almost beyond doubt that you've made a major strategic mistake.

The evidence for the mistake lies in the current health-care
struggle. But when I look at where you seem to have erred in that
struggle, it seems clear that the basic mistake in that arena is a
manifestation of a more general mistake you've made about how to play
your role as president.

In subsequent pieces in this series, I'll describe that general mistake
and I'll also prescribe a few courses of action --both on the specifics
of the health care issue, and more generally in re-casting your
presidential role-- that can put you back on the path of fulfilling the
enormous potential that millions of Americans, and millions elsewhere
around the world, saw in your becoming president earlier this year.

But first, here's how it's become clear that you've misjudged how to play your presidential role in the health care debate:

Two pieces of the picture make this clear: 1) This health care
reform issue is one on which you should have been able to completely
kick ass in your battle with your opponents; 2) instead, out of
this struggle, several months into it, you are losing power and your
opponents are becoming ever bolder and more outrageous.

1) This issue is MADE for taking the high and impregnable ground.
The health care crisis in America is a threat to so many vital
interests and values of the nation as a whole, and of Americans as
individuals and families and businesses, that a powerful president
attempting constructive change should have been able to both shape and
dominate the discussion. If this president's opponents had
employed fear-mongering lies and obstructionist tactics, if they'd
sacrificed the national and public interests in the quest for political
advantage and in the service of those monied interests that enrich
themselves off our present broken system-- if, in other words, a
president who came into this struggle with your gifts and your power
had done it right, those Republicans and right-wingers who have been
assailing you should have been tarred and feathered by now, and run out
of town on a rail.

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Instead, it seems to have been you who has been injured the most by
this conflict. You appear uncertain, unstead, on the defensive--
which is how a fighter in the ring looks when it's the other guy
landing the blows.

If where things are now in the health care battle is where you hoped
they'd be at this point, when you came up with your strategy, I'd be
very surprised.

So it's clear that you've made a major strategic error here. A
strategy that results in a draining away of your power, that has you on
the defensive, is one that doesn't work.

Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is (more...)